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Saturday, December 22, 2012

Battle Royale #9: Battle of the Silent Queens (The Results)

Well kiddies, here we are at the end of another Battle Royale. This time you, my faithful readers and true believers, were asked to choose between those two great stars of silent cinema - Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. A choice between "America's Sweetheart" and "The First Lady of American Cinema." And who did you pick? Well, it was kind of a landslide. Not quite as bad as our last Battle Royale, where The Marx Brothers trounced The Three Stooges by a score of 38 to 7, but still quite a mandate. And who was the mandate for, you ask. Well, it was for Miss Lillian Gish. With a final score of 31 to 16, or 66% to 34% if you will, the First Lady beat out the Sweetheart. From the beginning, I figured Gish would end up the winner (she did get my vote I know), but I expected it to be at least relatively close. Certainly a lot closer than it ended up being. Well, Mary does have an Oscar to lord over Gish, so there's at least that. And yes, I know, if the Oscars had been around, Gish would probably have won one as well. Then again, the year Pickford won hers, Gish gave one of her finest performances in The Wind. But I am rambling, so I digress.

Usually, at this point in the festivities, I say that we will be back with a brand spankin' new Battle Royale in just a few days - but such is not the case this time around. We are holding off the next one until after the new year. This way, you can all enjoy your holidays without any of the added stress of trying to decide who deserves the crown as Battle Royale Champion. Ya know, because there is so much stress in that. Anyway, we will be returning with that aforementioned brand spankin' new Battle Royale after the holidays. After back-to-back landslides, hopefully this new one will go back to biz as usual, and be a closer race - maybe even a photo finish. Also hopefully, we can get the voter turnout to be a bit better this time around - something we can perhaps write home about, as they say. Since the beginning, I have been trying to get as many voters involved as I can. So far, this has been met with only slight success. My wish is to get our little game into the triple digits on a regular basis. As of now, our best turnout was a mere 66 votes (courtesy of Astaire and Kelly), and this time we had just 47 voters. I send reminders to bunches of hopeful voters, but still nothing. This time around I sent voter invites to over a thousand people on Facebook alone, not to mention regular tweets, but still only 47 decided to come aboard. So basically, what I am saying is - c'mon people, let's get this thing going. I have seen other online polls get hundreds, even thousands of votes, so why can't we!!? Anyway, have a safe and happy holiday (whichever one you so choose to celebrate) and have pleasant and giddy dreams about our new Battle Royale. We will be traveling to the Far East next time around.